o profound a
deformation, because only these lend themselves to the application of
its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was known how to
isolate such systems. To sum up, _while modern physics is distinguished
from ancient physics by the fact that it considers any moment of time
whatever, it rests altogether on a substitution of time-length for
time-invention_.

It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge
ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed
to escape. On the flux itself of duration science neither would nor
could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. This
second kind of knowledge would have set the cinematographical method
aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished
habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an
effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body
will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will
pass at a given moment: the moments of time, which are only arrests of
our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the
very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The first kind
of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and
of making us in some measure masters of events; in return, it retains
of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views
taken of it by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into
the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, if it is
possible, is practically useless, it will not extend our empire over
nature, it will even go against certain natural aspirations of the
intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is reality itself that it will hold
in a firm and final embrace. Not only may we thus complete the intellect
and its knowledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within
the moving, but by developing also another faculty, complementary to the
intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real. For,
as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it means
creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be
because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself. Thus will
appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say
of a _life_ of the real. And thus will be seen in a new light the life
which we find on the surface